“In my opinion it grew up, and could only have grown up, as a by-product of playing recits to audiences who mostly can’t understand them. I don’t think there’s anything that can really make that procedure viable. If we have to do it (and we do), it’s a matter of deciding what compromises to endure, guarding against over-compensation, and playing mostly to an imaginary audience that understands the language directly from the mouth of the actor. But that’s not a satisfying feeling, and I don’t know the path to a satisfying one for secco recits.”

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Super info and reasoning again, and I see that we are in agreement about the continuo’s very important supportive role; about otherwise “staying out of the way;” and about the inadvisability of its playing more than a highly selective “interpretative” role. The observation on the extreme simplicity of the Linley/Dragonetti practice is encouraging to my instincts, as is the conclusion that there’s no historical “authenticity” argument in support of the neo-Rococo kinds of styling or the “eavesdropper” comment one sometimes hears now. If an artist of our time finds these last interesting paths to explore (and there’s no law against it), let him or her take any credit or blame, without appeal to the ancients. Currentzis could control all the factors we’ve been discussing via modern recording technology, something the operawrights of the settecento and early ottocento could neither have done nor foreseen, and we are free to like it or not, fair and square.

Ten days or so after this exchange, I went to the Medea, having secured a front-row-center balcony seat, generally my favorite sort of seat. For this production, Will was not conducting (he’d been in charge of Rossini’s Tancredi the night before). Neither was anyone else. As he had previously articulated to me, he had been working to obtain a closer bond between orchestra and singers, the sort of connection that would have been taken for granted in the time and place of composition (Naples, 1813), when the players would have understood every word being sung, and the connection between players and stage would have been much tighter, with no conductor to come between them. Consequently, the performance was in the hands of a maestro al cembalo (Jonathan Brandani, front and center, facing the stage) and the primo violino e capo d’orchestra (Jakob Lehmann, just to his audience left), with all guidance emanating from one or the other. And, looking down from my convenient perch, I could see them in energetic interaction with the players. Now, in Medea there are no secco recits; in fact, Mayr evidently had to rewrite them to conform with the then-recent Naples custom of rendering all recitative with orchestral accompaniment. And it was slightly eerie, looking down at the keyboard player and repeatedly confirming that he was indeed playing, but hearing not a note from him save for a couple of fleeting moments near the top of Act 2, and being unable to tell whether or not he was contributing to the overall texture. ^(I) So I queried Will about that, to which he replied: